


Howard

by Estrella3791



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky needs a break, Character Study, Guilt, I don't even know what this is but it's depressing, I rewatched Civil War and had a lot of feelings, I've never actually thoroughly understood what those are, PTSD, Pain, Shame, i think, if you're triggered by violence please don't read, memories of violence, not edited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-02 01:48:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17878790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estrella3791/pseuds/Estrella3791
Summary: When you've killed your friend, it doesn't go away.Even if the you that killed him wasn't really you.





	Howard

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry?
> 
> I honestly don't know what happened. One second I'm watching Civil War and the next I'm scribbling madly, and then there was this.
> 
> Enjoy?

He killed Howard.

He killed Howard, and he has to live with it.

It aches and gnaws and burns inside him, the knowledge that he snuffed out the light of that brilliant mind.  
Howard and he weren’t particularly close, but they were buddies. They always had each other’s’ backs when one of them was trying to pick up a European dame.   
Howard was patient when Bucky tripped over his million questions about science and the way the world works. They were friends.

And Bucky killed him.

All of the lives he’s taken eat away at his insides, with guilt and pain and shame and responsibility (his sins are so heavy, they slump his shoulders with their weight), until everything is too much and too loud and too overwhelming. 

“It wasn’t you, Buck,” Steve tells him, over and over again, always insistent and pleading.

“It wasn’t you, James,” Natalia tells him, soft but firm.

“It wasn’t you, Barnes,” Tony admits, sounding like the words got dragged out of them but he believes them all the same.

They don’t help.

Bucky knows that it wasn’t his mind, but he knows that it was his hands. His Winter Solider arm, the one that still had blood caked between the crevices, the one that had been the instrument of destruction for so, so many, is gone. Blown to bits by an Iron Man blaster. And oddly enough, having a Wakandan arm that has fought nothing but good fights helps immensely. It can better bear the weight of his past.

But his James Buchanan Barnes one, the one that he was born with, the one that he can’t get rid of, isn’t and will never be clean. Sometimes, in the night, he’ll wake, panicked, feeling the drip of blood through his fingers and the life squeezed out of throats burning his palm. He can wash it and scrub it and tell himself that it’s his hand, that it’s not HYDRA’s any more than he is, but it’s still heavier than his other arm, and not just because it’s still attached to his body.

And it was that hand that strangled Maria.

He never met her, of course. Howard didn’t meet her until long after his fall from the train. But he’s gone through files. He’s watched videos. He’s read letters and memos. And Maria Stark was a generous, sweet, kind, good lady, who Howard loved with all his heart and who did her best to show her wayward son that she loved him, no matter what.

And Bucky killed her.

Not Bucky. Bucky would never do that. Bucky doesn’t kill people. 

The Winter Soldier did.

The Winter Soldier killed Tony’s mom, using Bucky’s hand, and Bucky’s hand still feels soft flesh burning into it, still remembers the choked vibrations that rippled through neck.

It makes him want to die.

He never tells anyone, of course. He can’t. If he were to put the feelings into words, that would make them real, and he can’t give his demons life. They’re terrifying and tormenting enough as is, lurking in the shadows of his mind. He can’t use words to put a shape to them. He can’t.

So he doesn’t.

He likes to pretend that it will go away someday, the fact that he killed Howard and his pretty wife. He likes to pretend that someday, somehow, truth will out and that truth will not be the truth recorded by a roadside camera on December 16, 1991. That truth will be that the Starks died by accident, were murdered by the universe, that Bucky’s hands, both of them, all of them, are clean. He doesn’t have to spend sleepless nights grieving over Tony’s parents and the fact that he played a part. It’s a beautiful truth, a wonderful truth.

A fake truth.

The real one is ugly, and it has teeth, and it bites Bucky, viciously, again and again.

He killed Howard.


End file.
